SOLVED: The "potted meat" and "Mechanically separated chicken" mysteries

Bush_Eats_Beef

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Mon Aug-29-05 05:35 PM
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SOLVED: The "potted meat" and "Mechanically separated chicken" mysteries

http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=24695

Surprisingly, this staple of the boxcar hobo diet is available in virtually every supermarket, usually tucked between cans of tuna and pre-made chili. At a total cost of $1.47, we picked up two three-ounce cans of Armour Potted Meat (dubbed “America’s Favorite” on the can) and one 5.5-ounce can of Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product. Total combined nutritional value: 510 calories, 38 grams of fat, and for all you Atkins dieters, a whopping 47 grams of protein and no carbs. While perusing the unique nutritional statistics on the label, our eyes were inevitably drawn to the ingredients: Mechanically separated chicken, beef tripe, partially defatted cooked beef fatty tissue, beef hearts, water, partially defatted cooked pork fatty tissue, salt and less than 2% mustard, garlic, vinegar, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, natural flavors.

While beef hearts and beef tripe (the hard-to-digest muscular lining of the bovine stomach) sounded like things you would only eat on Fear Factor if promised a fabulous cash prize, at least they were recognizable. Mechanically separated chicken just sounded evil. Without delay, we dialed the 800 number on the Armour can to get some answers. “Mechanically separated chicken (MSC) is just chicken that has been separated by a machine,” claimed “Cindy,” a customer service representative from the Dial Corporation, owner of Armour Foods. “If you want to know more, I’ll have to transfer you to a product specialist.”

“These companies are famous for not talking about much of anything, actually,” says Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, the only chicken industry lobbying group willing to speak on the record about mechanically separated chicken. “They tend to not like to talk about how they fabricate some of these manufactured products.”

Could Lobb shed some light on the mystery of mechanically separated chicken? Unfortunately, yes. “The mechanical separator basically has a screw and a drive, and it just presses the chicken part against a fine screen at incredibly high pressure and the meat is squeezed off through a sieve. It’s usually dark meat from the drumstick or the thigh or possibly the back, which has meat that’s been locked up in the bones.” In other words, these are the scraps that the human separators simply cannot pick off. “I’ve actually seen them make it at the plant,” said Lobb, in a rare moment of frankness. “It looks like pink toothpaste when it comes out of the machine.” MSC can also be found in hot dogs, where it cannot exceed 12% of the contents and is required by law to be labeled as mechanically separated meat. But what about the oxymoronic-sounding “partially defatted cooked beef/pork fatty tissue.” Not even Richard Lobb could explain that one. However, our exhaustive search of supermarket ingredient labels found only one other product which contained this substance: dog food.